Advancing the GEDCOM Standard - Sat, 26 May 2018

For over 30 years, genealogy software has relied on the GEDCOM standard to transfer data between programs. There have been advances in the past years to allow programs to directly sync to online family trees, but that is nowhere near perfected and very few programs have the capability. So the fallback is still GEDCOM.

The big complaint about GEDCOM is that the data doesn’t all transfer between programs, especially source information. I’ve always maintained that GEDCOM has almost everything needed for all the information to transfer. The problem, I feel, is mostly on the developers side. In many cases, GEDCOM has been implemented improperly or incompletely. Often, constructs from older versions of GEDCOM are used which many programs don’t support, or their own user-defined tags are included which other programs do not understand.

The last official version 5.5.1 was released in 1999. That’s almost 20 years ago. Surely all developers should have had enough time to change their GEDCOM input and output to match that standard by now, shouldn’t they? If so, wouldn’t most of our data transfers be fixed?

Well no, they haven’t changed. They didn’t know what they were doing wrong and didn’t know how to fix it. They have mostly left their programs do with GEDCOM what they always have done.

What developers need is a stiff kick in the pants. Maybe something new to promote improvement. They need an annotated version of GEDCOM that explains the nuances to them and a set of best practices that they could follow.

Genealogy technology expert Tamura Jones has done just that. Tamura has spent the past number of years reviewing various parts of GEDCOM through articles on his blog www.tamurajones.net. He has critically reviewed dozens of genealogy programs with respect to their functionality and GEDCOM adherence. Personally, I have very much appreciated his detailed reviews of my software Behold, which have allowed me to address my program’s problems and fix and improve them wherever I can. Other developers would benefit greatly by similarly listening to Tamura’s advice.

Tamura Jones has created the annotated version of GEDCOM that is so much needed. He released it only a few days ago. It is called The FamilySearch GEDCOM 5.5.1 Specification Annotated Edition (TFG551SAE). It is now available to all developers and anyone else interested.

The document incorporates the 101 original pages of the GEDCOM 5.5.1 specification and adds annotations that expand the document to 194 pages. The annotations explain and correct the original text. In doing so, obsolete features are clearly denoted, and deprecated features are marked along with the reason for deprecating them. The best practice is spread throughout the document with links to external articles that provide even more detail. If all developers followed these best practices, which are not obvious from the original GEDCOM text alone, then GEDCOM transfer between programs would improve immensely.

Tamura solicited the help of seven technical reviewers, myself included. All of us have had a great deal of experience with GEDCOM. The others were:

- Tim Forsythe, creator of Gigatrees and VGedX (GEDCOM validator)
- Diedrich Hesmer, creator of Our Family Book and GEDCOM Service Programs
- Andrew Hoyle, creator of Chronoplex My Family Tree and GEDCOM Validator
- Stanley Mitchell, creator of ezGED Viewer
- Nigel Munro Parker, creator of the GED-inline GEDCOM validator
- Keith Riggle, blogger & genealogy software reviewer

I had the great pleasure of spending a few days with Tamura in October 2014 in the beautiful city of Leiden, Netherlands where he lives for the Gaenovium Conference that he put on. I immensely enjoyed the opportunity to talk to him in person.

So what does this document bring to the table in terms of improving genealogy data transfer standards? The FHISO organization has been working for years on coming out with a new standard. They have been working mostly on concepts and vocabulary and haven’t had the time or manpower available to do much more. But one of their goals is to create an Extended Legacy Format (ELF) that was “fully compatible with current uses of GEDCOM 5.5.1”.

In my opinion, Tamura Jones has done the first part of the job for them. He has put the rules in place and laid out the foundation for the ELF that FHISO wants. It is my hope that FHISO takes this opportunity to incorporate the cooperative effort of 8 GEDCOM experts and strongly suggest to all genealogy software developers that they take heed of this document and review their products and make improvements to them as recommended. This alone would considerably improve data transfer between programs, even without a new standard.